Ronna McDaniel, president of the Republican National Committee, says that RNC research shows President Trump’s approval among Hispanic Americans in Texas to have increased by 20 percent since 2016. That would mean Trump has nearly 1 million new Hispanic supporters. Has Trump’s support among Hispanics in Texas really increased that much? I don’t know, but it’s plausible to think it has increased significantly, both in Texas and elsewhere. McDaniel points »

Minneapolis once had the reputation of being a nice city. That seems, now, like a long time ago in a galaxy far away. These days, the reality is different. This sickening video of a gang of youths viciously brutalizing a man just outside Target Field, where the Twins play baseball, has gone national. It is visual proof of how feral downtown Minneapolis has become: More and more, violence intrudes on »

One of the more shocking aspects of last week’s Democratic debate was the cavalier manner in which the Constitution was treated. Beto O’Rourke said he intends to confiscate guns that were legally purchased by law-abiding Americans, and put out a t-shirt to that effect immediately after the debate. Kamala Harris said the same thing, and when Joe Biden pointed out that the government lacks power to do what she proposed, »

Immigration was always going to be a topic of discussion during Thursday’s Democratic debate. Thus, the candidates should have been prepared to speak about immigration, if not intelligently than at least without getting basic facts wrong. As Mark Krikorian documents, Joe Biden and Andrew Yang were unable to pass this modest test. Biden claimed that during the Obama administration, “we didn’t lock people up in cages; we didn’t separate families.” »

The highlight of the Dems’ debate this week must have been the 30-second advertisement run by Elizabeth Heng’s New Faces GOP PAC (video below). In the ad Ms. Heng explains the true meaning of socialism to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her followers. Gary Saul Morson gives a longer account of the phenomenon in “How the truth dawned.” Glenn Reynolds offers this characteristically concise and optimistic take on the ad and AOC’s »

Professor Gary Saul Morson’s essay “How the great truth dawned” leads off the September issue of The New Criterion. It’s not terribly long, but it must be the longest article ever published by the magazine, and you can easily see why. It is brilliant and moving. Beginning and ending with Solzhenitsyn, it takes up the Gulag, Communism, mass murder, Russian literature, the turn to God and much more. I want »

Several months ago, General Michael Flynn replaced his original defense team with Sidney Powell, a Texas lawyer who is a veteran of the Department of Justice and author of Licensed To Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice. Powell is a self-promoter, but she also appears to be a very good lawyer. She certainly is aggressive. Powell has launched an all-out attack against Flynn’s prosecutors, whom she regards as »

Towards the end of the second hour of last night’s Democratic debate, Joe Biden delivered a rambling and mostly incoherent answer to a question about the Iraq war that hadn’t been asked. I wondered whether Biden was losing command, but I didn’t stick around for the third hour to find out. Now, I gather that Biden was, indeed, losing command. A rambling answer to a question in the third hour »

“Lucretia,” Power Line’s international woman of mystery, is back with me again this week with the third installment in our special series confronting the pernicious New York Times “1619 Project,” this time taking on the argument that slavery is the central factor in the rise of modern industrial capitalism—a proposal so laughable that we actually spend a lot of our time talking about entirely tangential subjects. (For listeners interested in a serious compilation »

The proposed “demogrant” on offer in George McGovern’s ill-fated presidential campaign of 1972 was set at $1,000 per year. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $6,000 in current dollars. Now Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposes to raise McGovern’s demogrant to $1,000 per month. McGovern is not exactly the yin to Andrew Yang. They are on the same wavelength and the memory is making me feel young and foolish »

John captured in six pithy observations about tonight’s Democratic debate what it probably would have taken me 600 words to express. So I’ll try to find 600 different words. Like John, I didn’t make it to the end. I had to stop after two hours. I’ve got the thing on tape, so if I read about any significant occurrences in the final hour, I’ll check them out. I turned on »

Another week, another Democratic presidential debate that seems to last a week. I think I’ve figured it out. While it may seem like they are pandering to the progressive base with progressively more extravagant promises of free stuff, they are really planning to wear us down, Chinese water-torture style, until we say no mas!, and hand the keys to the White House to one of them to make it stop. »

Frederic Pryor died earlier this month. He was the “throw in” in the 1962 prisoner exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The principals were Francis Gary Powers and Rudolf Abel. The deal was the subject of the 2015 movie “Bridge of Spies.” Pryor was a Yale graduate student in economics. He found himself in East Berlin studying East Germany’s economic system when the Stasi arrested him for spying. »

Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, deserves to be prosecuted. His crimes, false statements to federal investigators, were documented by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, an Obama appointee. Andy McCarthy discusses the crimes here. McCabe is an enemy and fierce critic of President Trump. I always worry when enemies of the president face criminal prosecution. Sending political enemies to prison is a hallmark of authoritarian »

I did better than most viewers last night; I stuck out the Democratic debate for an hour or an hour and a half. I was struck by the fact that in all that time, the economy was never mentioned. It turns out I didn’t miss a thing: the economy was barely mentioned during the entire marathon evening. This is understandable, perhaps, to the extent that the Democrats have no answers »

Ammo Grrrll waves BYE BYE, WALMART, BYE BYE. She writes: Et tu, Walmart? Seriously? Do you have no idea who your customer base is? Well, whatever. I’m done. It’s a shame, too, because Walmart is the definite Big Dog shopping emporium in our Dusty Little Village. For groceries, I have two other choices in town, one of which I have always preferred anyway: Bashas. It is a pleasant, to-scale kind »

Sure, I know it isn’t over. I didn’t watch it to the end. Who possibly could? My comments will be brief: 1) Joe Biden was the winner tonight. He pretended to be sane, and did a decent imitation. 2) Julian Castro–did anyone remember that he was on the stage?–is running to be Elizabeth Warren’s VP. He did her dirty work tonight. 3) It’s time to pull the plug on Bernie »